NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
7d ago
I’m open to arguments that Maidan was going to happen regardless of western involvement. I think the evidence points to the west being heavily involved, but I can have epistemic humility here.
But how can you argue that it wasn’t deposing a man who won a fair election, and that his supporters, who happen to be geographically concentrated, are right to be angry to the point of secession?
NewCharlesInCharge
9d ago
I think we agree.
NewCharlesInCharge
11d ago
Roughly $5,000, dog had another surgery later on to remove a bunch of tumors.
Got the dog in 2018, at about $60 per month since then, I'm still ahead, but that's very luck of the draw. I'd prefer not to have some other incident that would make the insurance pay out and deliver more value for my premiums, I'd rather he just die in his sleep when the time comes.
These products are regulated and competetive, I expect the rates to be actuarily fair and the median customer to have been better of self insured.
NewCharlesInCharge
11d ago
The good ones have no trouble filling their schedules, there's no incentive for them to join such a system.
If someone advertises you can treat it as signal that they're not good enough to book clients via word of mouth only.
NewCharlesInCharge
11d ago
I've expressed before that veterinary care has a lot of medicine, especially the business side, figured out better than humans.
Insurance, for the most part, really is for the big stuff that can't be anticipated, and is priced as such. It's $60 a month to insure my 14 year old beagle with 50% coinsurance. It doesn't cover the cost of exams or checkups. It does cover things like surgeries and cancer treatment.
I once used it for a spine surgery. The total cost was about $7,000, quoted upfront. I paid about $3,500 and the insurance covered the other half. This would have been well into hundreds of thousands of dollars if performed on a human.
I was able to have conversations via email, not through some dumb HIPAA compliant portal.
That most dogs are uninsured probably keeps costs down, as does that typically pet insurance has a higher coinsurance figure than human insurance. There's an unavoidable principal-agent problem that we exacerbate with regulations that practically remove all incentive for people to price shop.
NewCharlesInCharge
11d ago
That assumes that you need to smash particles together at higher and higher energies to test your hypotheses.
If you're on the hunt for gravitons and antigravitons, would that even be part of the research? Can gravitons even collide?
If you're starting fresh with an unexplored branch of physics you'll not have gotten to the point where testing hypotheses is so far along the curve of diminishing returns that the next advancement requires billions of dollars of capital. The first particle accelerator had a diameter of 4.5 inches. The first one that managed to split an atom was about 2 meters wide.
What of all the secretive Space Force X-37B missions? If you're looking for graviton signals it would be helpful to be in an environment where there are fewer of them.
NewCharlesInCharge
12d ago
But the basic research needed just isn't there, and it would seem pretty hard to hide a facility better-equipped for fundamental physics experiments than the civilian ones.
This is the core claim, that the USG has sequestered an elite cadre of physicists and kept their discoveries under wraps. One observation in favor of this claim: the dearth of fundamental breakthroughs in physics for the past fifty years.
NewCharlesInCharge
13d ago
Did the police not perceive this as a threat to their own daughters? Are any of them on record?
NewCharlesInCharge
13d ago
No one originally wanted to invade Afghanistan or reshape it into a modern western ally.
16 year old me had been exposed to what the Taliban was all about and thought the world would be better off without it. A just punishment for the Taliban for cooperating with the group that struck at America, and a nice side effect of liberating the people of Afghanistan.
40 year old me sees this as a fool’s errand. To think this would work requires an ignorance of how the Taliban gained power in the first place. The documentaries I’d consumed at sixteen weren’t at all concerned with that question.
NewCharlesInCharge
18d ago
At my get-married-in-a-hurry-to-secure-immigration-status wedding we had about this many.
At my wedding about a year later in China it was about 400. This is a typical size.
NewCharlesInCharge
23d ago
Had it been universal it would have been very Catholic of him, which isn’t something you can often say.
Awhile back I learned from The Pillar that his marriage isn’t even canonically valid. He and Jill were married in some random non-Catholic chapel, and never obtained a convalidation.
Jill also has a still living husband from a previous marriage that was never annulled.
So forget the politically charged question of whether he ought to be denied communion for his many public statements that conflict with church teaching. He ought to be denied for the plain reason that many others are: he’s publicly living in sin.
NewCharlesInCharge
26d ago
This seems aligned with the position that conciousness somehow arises out of information processing.
I maintain that conciousness is divine and immaterial. While the inputs can be material - a rock striking me on the knee is going to trigger messages in my nervous system that arrive in my brain - the experience of pain is not composed of atoms and not locatable in space. I can tell you about the pain, I can gauge it on a scale of 1-10, you can even see those pain centers light up on an FMRI. But I can't capture the experience in a bottle for direct comparison to others.
Both of these positions are untestable. But at least my position predicts the untestability of the first.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
A sufficient speed differential between Earth and a kilometer wide object would literally destroy the Earth, flipping it inside out and melting it.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Seattle doesn't have hot summers. Midday typically has ideal temperatures.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Maybe this is part of a template I’m not familiar with, but doesn’t seem to be pro assassin, just making light of a guy named Luigi being in jail.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Oh wow randos are sending him mana. Tipping a guy with fake money for doing a murder.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
The ACA mandates that insurers have to spend at least 80% or 85% (based on size of market) of premiums on actual provision of healthcare.
Cost cutting is of little use to them. If they take in $100M, currently spend $85M on medical, but are able to cut medical costs by 30% to about $60M, then they'd also have to cut that $15M allocated to other stuff down to about $10.5M. And give up about $30M in premiums.
With this regulation becoming more efficient hurts your bottom line.
But if they can grow the amount spent total, then the 15% or 20% they're allowed to use on other things also grows.
It's basically cost plus contracting, which is apparently popular when you're spending other people's money.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
I don’t think you can. One of the most “institutions are untrustworthy” moments was public health telling us that gathering in the thousands to protest for racial justice was okay because racism was more pernicious to public health than COVID.
But if we weren’t protesting for racial justice then we had to stay home, not visit our dying relatives or attend their funerals, and certainly not gather for mere socialization.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
"Overrepresented" is not enough. The claim is that woke politics is overwhelmingly dominant to the point where there're no antiwoke studios. Trans devs would have to be overwhelmingly dominant to match that claim or something else is going on to give even an overrepresented minority this outsized say.
I think politeness and not wanting to get in trouble with HR plays a big role.
I work with some trans engineers. Luckily there's no intersection between their identity and what we work on. It wouldn't make sense to inject the concept of gender identity into storage drivers.
But if I worked in some area that involved storytelling, and the trans engineers wanted to insert their identity into the stories, I'd be incentivized not to speak my mind. I'd want to say things like this is a vanishingly small portion of the population, it's harmful to children to encourage gender identity navel gazing, etc. But then I'd certainly be upsetting all but the most extreme high-decoupling autists among them, and I'd end up being told by HR not to say those things.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Bloodletting was ahead of its time?
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Not eligible, but at least in my state of Washington they still get notices to appear. They're required to refuse due to their citizenship status, but that requires them to both read and fully understand the summons they've been sent.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
I wonder if this move is actually about Trump, designed to rope him into a Logan Act violation in which he contacts Putin to make some diplomatic assurances ahead of being sworn in.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
I would not be surprised if someone on the federal circuit asserted that punitive damages aren't punishments.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
In the private sphere Musk also has the advatnage that he can attract top talent on prestige. Government workers enjoy the opposite of that. The most common response to someone pontificating on government work is "the job security must be nice." In other words, you're only going to be fired for terrible malfeasance, not for run-of-the-mill incompetence. And as a result there's not a whole lot of competence on display among the federal government workforce.
To make the government leaner and more effective, I'd couple cuts with an increase to prestige. Make government jobs highly sought after. Make the pay something like 95th percentile for comparable industry jobs. Make expectations high, with a target on attrition at well above zero. Grant benefits that are simply unavailable outside of the federal workforce. They could have immediate access to Tier I support at other federal agencies. Access to exclusive spaces at national parks. Franking privileges. The rights of an FFL without the paperwork. There are many possible privileges that would cost very little.
The goal should be for people to react to someone saying they work for the feds with the same respect and fascination as say, a rocket engineer for SpaceX.
At least for engineering, the bar was never raised or lowered to actually get hired, they just fucked with the top of the pipeline. So for what they called under-represented minorities the standards were lowered to get a call back on your resume and to get to the first set of screening interviews performed by engineers. But once you reached that point the pipeline didn't differentiate.
I'm sure given the size of the company and how so many are outwardly ideological on these issues that there was some very concious bias being applied by interviewers, but that won't change because we're done with the company officially endorsing DEI.
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